BARRIER #1: Lack of Hope

Lack of hope is a big barrier stopping folks from creating a sustainable future and a meaningful life.

I’ve had students arrive at my program with so little hope that they arrive in tears. I’ve seen previous hardcore environmental activists burnout and and lose all hope such that they now prescribe to nihilism (nothing matters anyways).

But I believe that this lack of hope is unwarranted.

The “I can’t do anything” mentality stems from an assumption that top-down solutions are the only effective options. So for instance, the solution to a drought problem is for the state to invest in large hydro-dams or massive desalination plants. The solution to atmospheric carbon levels is to build carbon capture and sequestration schemes. The solution to energy problems is to build coal or nuclear power plants.

The belief is that if the problem is of a massive scale, then the only possible solutions must be orchestrated at a massive scale as well. It’s the large corporations and the governments who must solve the problems, right?

Wrong.

An individual, acting with or without a like-minded community, can be a monumental force or catalyst for change.

Individual and personal actions cannot be understated and it is the aggregate of these daily decisions that has an enormous impact on systems. I believe this whole-heartedly.

And I also have research to prove it.

Dr Peter Coombes is an Australian researcher and a mentor of ours who has been studying decentralized solutions for twenty years, particularly in the area of water. Seeing how industry and government often claimed that decentralized solutions were economically and technically inefficient, he set out to use data and research to uncover the truth about the impacts of the aggregate of small-scale actions. In the last ten years Dr. Coombes (along with author co-authors) have shown again and again that decentralized and distributed solutions (water efficiency, energy efficiency, rainwater harvesting, small-scale renewable energy, rain gardens, small-scale storm water retention and more) improve the economic efficiency of the entire urban system and provide huge societal benefits.

For Michelle & me, the changes we’ve made in our home and backyard have arguably returned a far larger value to us than simply an economic efficiency. The food we harvest from our yard is far healthier; we and our children are learning skills that we think are very important. The bees, butterflies and biodiversity in our yard is astounding (and wonderful to enjoy); no dirty stormwater leaves our property to eventually pollute the river). Over 20,000 liters of rainwater supports the apple trees and raspberry bushes in our forest garden. The neighbour’s we’ve gotten to know and the community we’ve built are far more important to us than anything else.

We can also feel great knowing that our small efforts do make a difference towards the problems on the large scale.

And when someone argues that mass-adoption will never happen, I don’t get too concerned. Books like The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell, have shown that we don’t need to strive for mass adoption. In fact, the tipping point is likely in the single digit percentages.

In the end I truly believe that we can’t blame each other for the problems that exist on the global scale. All we can do is make the solutions more enticing than what exists right now.

And if we do that, change will happen really quickly.

In 2015 we won the prestigious Emerald Award, recognizing outstanding environmental achievement for small business. Watch the video below for a 2-minute overview of what we’ve done in our own backyard.

Keep an eye on your inbox, and in the next email I’ll going to give you some tips to dissolve the second barrier – lack of knowledge (but’s it’s not just any knowledge, it’s a specific type of knowledge).

Past Students Say…